If Labor wins, the Jewish community faces a challenge rebuilding bridges

If a week is a long time in politics, a five-week election campaign is an eternity. 

When I wrote two months ago that antisemitism was shaping up to be a key issue in an Australian federal election for the first time in our lives, the issue dominating the lives of Jewish Australians was also dominating the news cycle and political debate. 

Newspoll had the Coalition ahead 51-49 on a two-party preferred basis, and a hung parliament was looming as overwhelmingly likely. The prospect of the Albanese Labor Government becoming the first single-term government to lose in Australia since 1931 was a plausible scenario. Peter Dutton was not only resonating with the Jewish community, he seemed to have the momentum and ascendancy with the broader population. 

But a lot has changed in the last two months. Midway through the election campaign proper, Labor now leads Newspoll 52-48. Dutton’s approval ratings have plummeted, Anthony Albanese’s lead as Preferred Prime Minister has widened, and Labor has gone from a $2.60 outsider to hold government with Sportsbet in early March to a $1.16 favourite in mid-April. 

The conversation has changed too – the usual issues that dominate elections – the economy and cost of living, housing and healthcare, energy and climate – are dominating as they always do. Following high-profile arrests and legislative reforms, antisemitism has stopped dominating the national headlines. 

Antisemitism has not vanished by any stretch of the imagination – but the spate of high-profile attacks on buildings, institutions, vehicles and homes that we awoke to on a seemingly weekly basis have seemed to recede into the past. Even as the ceasefire in Gaza – and the hostage releases that it enabled – began and ended, discussion of and protests against the war have not returned to anywhere near their fever-pitch levels in 2024. 

So we return to a more familiar world of sorts – antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are no longer issues dominating the national scale, but rather, the role they are playing on the election is playing out on a microlevel – narrowcasting into seats with significant Jewish or Muslim populations. 

In the inner-North of Melbourne and the Western suburbs of Sydney, the Greens and activist groups continue to charge Labor with “support for genocide”. But in the inner South-East of Melbourne, and the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, where most of the Australian Jewish community reside, the Liberals continue to charge Labor and Teal Independents with abandoning the Jewish community and Israel. 

This divergence between the Jewish community and the rest of the population feels starker than ever. It is hard to think of a demographic outside the Jewish community that still has such strong faith in Peter Dutton and the Coalition. And equally, Dutton’s success in winning the confidence of the Jewish community has not translated elsewhere across the country. 

It is always fraught to make predictions, but the current polls point overwhelmingly to the Albanese Government being returned – and this poses two key and related questions for the Jewish community. The first is what will its makeup look like – who will sit in the government caucus room, who will sit around the cabinet table, who will have the balance of power if it is a minority government, and who will be there to represent the Jewish community’s interests.  

The second question, inextricably connected to the first, is what kind of relationship will our community as a whole have with a re-elected Albanese Government, and how will we build or rebuild a productive relationship with a Labor Party that our community has fallen so significantly out with? 

These two questions are inextricably related because who we choose to send to represent us in the 48^th parliament will say a lot about the kind of relationship we seek to have with our next government. 

The seat of Macnamara is the most interesting illustration of this dilemma. As public support for the Coalition slides, the idea that the Liberals could win a seat they lost by over 12% last election is not only a fantasy, but a dangerous one. It encourages voters to move away from Labor’s Josh Burns, and if Labor finishes third, the Greens will almost certainly win the seat.  

The irony of the Jewish community’s anger at Labor seeing a Jewish MP defeated by a Greens challenger would be obvious, when Jewish anger at the Greens is far greater than anger at Labor. 

A move away from Labor in Macnamara while the rest of the country swings back to the ALP could see a Labor Government returned without its most prominent and active Jewish voice to represent the community in its decision-making forums.  

There is no universe in which a second-term Labor Government will better represent the Jewish community if it loses the Jewish Labor parliamentarian who represents our community proudly and defiantly. 

His representation has been important in gaining funding for community security and artistic quarters; anti-vilification and anti-doxxing legislation; and inquiries into campus antisemitism.  

Ideological Jewish groups that have run campaigns directly against Burns are playing with fire – not just because of the risk that urging a vote for the Liberals will enable the Greens to win the seat, but because painting one of the country’s few prominent and outspoken Jewish politicians as an enemy of his own community is shameful, and risks taking us down a terrible path. 

The prospect of a second-term Labor government will clearly upset sections of our community. It will require fences to be mended and bridges to be rebuilt. It will likely require both Labor and the Jewish community to be prepared to swallow some pride and let go of some bitterness. 

There will be serious work to be done – because clearly, the Jewish community cannot afford to have no productive relationship with its federal government, whichever party that forms that government. 

Of course, most of our community leadership know this, but banking on the Liberals defeating Labor is not a solution to antisemitism. Putting all our chips on blue will only bankrupt us if the electoral roulette lands on red. 

Our first task is to cast our votes wisely. But our next task will be to accept the results that we cannot alone control, wherever they fall, and to work to make sure our bipartisan relationship with the next parliament is better than the one we had with its predecessor.